Bitcoin (BTC)
Basics * Short explanation: Internet money and digital gold. * Longer explanation: Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency. Released in early 2009, it is a new form of internet money that is fundamentally different from existing currencies. It is decentralised, meaning it isn’t controlled by any single company or person, and all transactions are peer-to-peer. The history of all transactions is continually being verified by powerful computers, so it is impossible to change once a transaction has been accepted. This means that anybody in the world is able to buy bitcoin and send money to anybody else cheaply and quickly, which has never been possible before. * Current issues: Scalability. Bitcoin can typically handle 5–7 transactions per second, with fees from a few cents to a few dollars. When the transaction volume on the network increases, fees skyrocket and transactions take a long time to clear. In contrast, Visa and Mastercard can reportedly handle around 2000 transactions per second. In order to be a global payments system, Bitcoin needs to improve on this dramatically. * Date of trading launch: 28-04-2013 (on coinmarketcap) * Money or store of value * No Premine or Presale * PoW * Block production time 10 min, worst case for confirmation time: 120 blocks, 7 TPS * Network Security Costs: 10% mining inflation * Inflation: 10% * Has multisig History * For a comprehensive history you can go the Wikipedia's page here and Bitcoin.com also has a nice history series which you can find here. * The coin found parity with the US dollar on February 9, 2011. Six years later, it would trade at parity with an ounce of gold. * The Father of cryptos, Bitcoin is considered the most secure of the cryptos, partly because it has been around the longest and therefore has the most commercial proof of security, and partly because the amount of computing power and number of nodes providing the protection is the largest. * When Satoshi first created the Bitcoin protocol 10 years ago, the program was created with the C++ programming language. However, the original client’s binary data can conform to any programming language standard, as long as it adheres to the blockchain’s consensus rules. * On the origin of the logo: “I propose that we adopt the Thai baht currency symbol, ฿, as the official bitcoin currency symbol and BTC as the official bitcoin three letter currency code,” wrote Bitcointalk forum member “NewLibertyStandard” on Feb 5, 2010. (Four months earlier, the same individual made the first bitcoin purchase using fiat currency, paying $5.02 for 5,050 BTC.) A poll in mid-2011, saw forum users vote overwhelmingly in favor of ฿, ahead of such options as β, Ƃ, and Ƀ. It wasn’t until years later, in June of 2017, that Bitcoin would finally gain its own unicode symbol and become ₿. * Sourceforge was the very first Bitcoin forum ever. Which soon was followed up with Bitcointalk.org. * Bitcoinmarket.com was the very first Bitcoin exchange, it was proposed on Bitcointalk.org. * Slush was the very first mining pool. For an in depth look into BTC mining pools, read this piece, by Coinmetrics. Pro's and Con's Advantages * First mover advantage * Largest network effects * Largest due diligence around changes due to the number of stakeholders and value in the currency Risks * Disagreements between miners may cause instability * Political spotlight * Currencies with superior technology may overtake it in the future as it has been very slow to adapt. * Government may enforce regulations to prevent the conversion of FIAT to bitcoin (although this may apply to all cryptocurrencies which don’t have compliance as a central aim) * The transaction backlog has been growing and it is yet to be seen whether Segwit will solve the issue. * possibility of a chain reaction occurring as miners switch between Bitcoin and other more profitable mined cryptos leading to longer block times, larger backlogs and uncertainty creeping in. * Miner centralization; "At the time of publication (4-2-2020), between F2pool, Poolin, Btc.com, Viabtc, and Antpool, the pools are hashing more than 49% of the BTC network hashrate." Bitcoin vs. Ethereum * The following information comes from this post by Consensys (5-9-2019): "The key element that distinguishes Ethereum from Bitcoin is smart contracts — agreements that are embedded in code so that they can automatically execute. Among the other fundamental differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum are their programming languages. Bitcoin uses a stack-based language while Ethereum uses a Turing-complete language. Their block times and hashing algorithms are also different. Ethereum’s core developers believe that moving Ethereum to a Proof of Stake system will make its smart contract-based network more efficient and secure." Tether and Bitcoin price correlation * "The issuance of new tether tokens is helping Bitcoin prices rise, according ''(4-10-2019) to new research by TokenAnalyst. The company found up to 70% of the time there is an issuance of Tether, the price of bitcoin also rises, a significant discovery when we’re remind there was more than 2 million tether minted this year. The numbers also change depending on which kind of Tether is gonna be minted. It rises 70% of the time there is tether being issued as an ERC20 token, and 50% of the time it is issued on their native Omni chain."'' Competition between independent implementations * From this post "Prior to 2013, there was no software project named Bitcoin Core. The Satoshi client was sometimes just called the reference implementation or Bitcoin-QT/Bitcoind. '' ''Then in February 2013, Gavin Andresen, a prominent Bitcoin developer, posted to the Bitcoin Foundation forum asking: There was some discussion about renaming Bitcoin-Qt and the reference implementation in general in IRC today; I thought some of you smart people might have good name ideas. Mike Hearn, another developer, then responded: Oh good, about time. This has irritated me for a while. How about Bitcoin Core?" Since then many clients have popped up, the most well known (8-2019) are: * Bitcoin Core * BTCD * Libbitcoin * Bitprim * bcoin * Bits of Proof * Ceasure * Bitcoinj * Ufasoft Coin * Picocoin/libcoin * Parity Bitcoin * Bitcrust History of BTC Forks * A map of the main consensus forks (2009-2019) of Bitcoin can be found here (11-2019). * Bitcoin has had the following soft and hard forks: 2010-08-15: Value Overflow Incident (Soft Fork) 2010-10-12: 1MB Block Size Limit (Soft Fork) 2012-04-01: Pay-to-Script-Hash (Soft Fork) 2013-05-15: Migration from Berkely DB to LevelDB (Hard Fork) 2013-07-04: Strict DER Encoding for Signatures (Soft Fork) 2015-12-14: OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY (Soft Fork) 2016-07-04: OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY (Soft Fork) After this the more well known forks happened. 2017-08-01: User Activated Hard Fork (Block size limit to 8MB) which created Bitcoin Cash (the hard forks that happened on the BCH chain can be viewed on their page or on this map) 2017-08-24: SegWit (Soft Fork) After this, BTC has had multiple chain splits, of which Bitcoin Gold is the most famous. BCH has also split in two, creating Bitcoin SV (on 2018-11-15). Team, etc. * Has loads of full-time/part-time/independent developers working on it. And also bigger companies like Blockstream who pay developers. * Satoshi Nakamoto; the anonymous creator of the Bitcoin whitepaper and the entity that launched it's genesis block on Jan. 3, 2009. * Martti ‘Sirius’ Malmi; The second developer that started working on the Bitcoin code and who helped and talked with Satoshi * Hal Finney; early Bitcoin dev and took part in the first ever BTC transaction with Satoshi only a couple days after the launch. * Gavin Andresen; early well known developer that started to interact with the code and Satoshi. Satoshi handed over the keys of the github code page to Gavin. * Jeff Garzik; earl Bitcoin dev * Checkmate — Full-time Engineer and spare-time On-chain analyst for Bitcoin. Notable big holders * Presumably Satoshi holds over a million BTC, but has never moved any coin and most consider these coins lost. * Besides Satoshi's million BTC, another 2-3M are speculated lost due to losing private keys * Craig Wright claims to be Satoshi, and therefor claims to have huge amounts of BTC. When asked in court he changed his stance and said he couldn't access the coins due to a complicated blind trust fund he and other created at the start of mining. * Roger Ver was a very early investor and even though he switched sides dramatically towards Bitcoin Cash, he still claims (4-2019) to hold BTC as a hedge. * Grayscale (owned by DCG) owns 1% of the BTC supply. "Since the start of 2018, Grayscale has seen its Bitcoin coffers swell by 30,600 BTC to 203,000 total, now accounting for more than 1% of the asset’s total circulating supply." * From a Bitcoin.com article (18-10-2019): "Various studies have noted the wealth disparity in the crypto space with one recent piece of research claiming that around 2% of BTC addresses control approximately 80% percent of the cryptocurrency."Category:Coins/Tokens